It is time to defend the role of parliamentary whips as they are assailed on all sides. The term comes from hunting, where the whippers-in only rarely use their whips. Their main purpose is to keep the pack together. If they are not permitted to do so, the pack falls apart.

This seems to be happening at present. Some Tory MPs, chiefly new ones, appear not to understand what “taking the whip” means. You sign up for the party, without which you would almost certainly not win a seat. You must accept discipline, yes, but you also receive information, protection and guidance without which your life would be lonely indeed, and you could not rise within the system. If you see yourself as a courageous whistleblower and publicly talk about private conversations with whips, you damage the interests of all. Trust vanishes.

To be fair to both sides, the problem has got much worse because of Covid. Personal meetings have often been impossible. MPs, even of the same party, barely know one another.

There is also a longer-term difficulty. From the Tony Blair era onwards, our political culture has come to see 10 Downing Street as the equivalent of the West Wing of the White House. That is wrong in a non-presidential system like ours: a British prime minister must govern through the House of Commons, or he/she comes a cropper (which is happening now).

This means, among other things, that the prime minister should see the chief whip almost every day. Since the whips were moved out of 12 Downing Street, they have become cut off from No 10. In the Thatcher and Major eras, well over half the Cabinet had whips’ office experience and many had been chief whip. The whips’ office was a central part of training for governing. No prime minister this century has been a whip. It shows.

The other day, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff reportedly ordered 20 parliamentary private secretaries in to lecture them on how to do their job. That is hopeless. He is a civil servant: how can he know how to handle elected Members of Parliament?

To try to mend the relationship, another metaphor from hunting may help. Hounds are trained by the whips not to “riot” after the scent of anything but the approved quarry. At present, this is not happening, so the parliamentary party is rioting.

Matters of conscience should not be slipped into government bills

Those who advocate assisted suicide (I prefer that term to “assisted dying”, since all decent people want to help others who are approaching death) are having yet another go. This week, in the Lords, probably tomorrow, an attempt will be made to amend the Government’s Health and Care Bill. If passed, the amendment would force the Government to bring forward an Assisted Dying Bill within a year.

This is a strange way of proceeding. There is already an Assisted Dying private members Bill before Parliament. Constitutional convention frowns on trying the same thing twice at the same time. It confuses everything and is unfair to other legislation.

Besides, assisted suicide is, in terms of law, not a health and care issue: its introduction would require a change in the criminal law. By slipping in the word “medical”, the amendment seeks to evade this problem, but it does not solve it. I am sorry that Lord Forsyth, one of the very best performers in the Lords, is pursuing the issue in this way. If he felt differently about the subject, I can imagine him launching a brilliant forensic assault on his own method.

Matters such as assisted suicide are rightly classified as questions of conscience. If they can be slipped into government bills, then no legislation is safe from pressure-group hijack.

Parliamentary guerrilla warfare is a bad way to deal with such a serious subject. I am struck by the letter released to all peers from James Jones, the former Bishop of Liverpool, who led the review of the Hillsborough tragedy. Bishop Jones also chaired the inquiry which investigated the extraordinary unnecessary deaths of 456 patients at Gosport War Memorial Hospital (a criminal investigation is still in progress). He writes that his knowledge of what happened after the Hillsborough disaster and allegedly at the Gosport War Memorial Hospital gives him little confidence that the treatment of vulnerable patients will be benign: “I fear the patronising disposition of unaccountable power in our institutions when treating those who have little power to speak up for themselves.”

So that problem is grave even under the existing law which forbids assisted suicide. Imagine how much worse it could get if the same authorities were allowed to help the almost powerless kill themselves.

What’s in a name?

I must admit that I had not realised, until his death, that Meat Loaf was a person. I had thought it was the name of a group.

His stage name presented a problem for this paper’s obituaries department, its editor tells me. His obituary, already on stock, was filed, in accordance with normal rules, under “Loaf, Meat”; so it took some time finding.

When the obituary appeared last week, a further problem arose. Must the late Mr Loaf be referred to each time as “Meat Loaf”, or could he become simply “Loaf” on second mention? An uneasy compromise was reached, in which he became “Loaf” only sporadically. I wish these great artists would think about the problems they cause us little people before they drop dead.